The CIA played a key role in shaping the film’s narrative, corresponding with the filmmakers to negotiate favorable access to a movie that one CIA official described as “get[ting] behind the winning horse” of the “first and biggest” movie about the Bin Laden raid, according to internal CIA emails obtained by Judicial Watch. The White House gave its blessing as well, calling it the most “high profile” project to date, and suggesting it get more “visibility,” as one White House official wrote. When the screenwriter, Mark Boal, met with the CIA at their headquarters in Langley, Virginia, for a meeting scheduled on Friday, 9:30 AM on May 20th, only 19 days after the assassination, he was accompanied by Michael Feldman of the Glover Park Group, a Washington consulting firm specializing in “strategic communications,” according to the CIA emails. The director, Kathryn Bigelow, also visited Langley to “meet the people Mark had been talking too,” another CIA official noted.

Dave "Doctor" Gonzo is a renegade record producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.